Reynaud is not
a well-known audio brand in the U.S., but it should be. In each of its
products, this French loudspeaker manufacturer delivers just about everything
dear to an audiophile's heart: rock-solid build quality, handsome styling, and
above all, truly exciting music making—at eminently reasonable prices.

The hardest
speakers to review are those that don't do anything glaringly wrong but don't
quite do anything exceptional either. When forced to describe their sound,
these speakers are hard to fault—and also, whether the reviewer is conscious
of it or not, hard to get excited about. I know the reviews that stick in my
mind as products to officially consider are not necessarily the ones where nary
a negative word is spoken about a particular item; the reviews I remember are
the ones where the writer sounds truly jazzed. And even if the logical,
analytical left brain of the reviewer finds a few caveats, I'm most interested
in what the right brain has to say.

Reynaud
speakers are the products of a designer who balances his right and left brain
exceedingly well to my way of thinking. They are superbly well-engineered, but
JM Reynaud undoubtedly has the heart of an artist. His speakers do most things
right in a left-brain kind of way, but also have an idiosyncratic je ne sais
quoi that sets them apart from the crowd. They may not be the best choice
for the more analytical among us, but they manage to communicate a musical truth
that few speakers do, and are the most truly "live"-sounding speakers I've heard
in my home.

In the
interests of full disclosure, I must mention that the Twin Signature and
Cantabile Signature speakers were supplied to me for audition by the American
distributor for Reynaud—and my fellow Positive Feedback writer—Bob
Neill. Since starting his Amherst Audio boutique, Bob has written mostly music
reviews for PFO. The two of us shared some back-and-forth dialogue
during the review process, but never at any point did he attempt to exert any
influence on my conclusions. Disclosure completed and I hope case closed. Off we go!

Bob was
actually taking a chance with me, because any speakers sent to me for review are
to some extent at an immediate disadvantage. My reference speakers, the Harbeth
Compact 7-ES monitors, are by a wide margin the longest-lived link in my
audiophile chain. I have numerous times referred to them in print as "my
beloved Harbeths." I am so in thrall to their way—a very slightly mellowed
but otherwise exemplary top-to-bottom tonal accuracy—that most other speakers
I've auditioned have struck me as unexceptional or unacceptable (the classic
Spendor models are the only others that have seriously competed for my
affection, and I have a pair of their smallish 3/1P monitors as my back-ups). Some of those other speakers may have been faster, more detailed or more
dynamic, but when you don't get tonality right, you've stumbled right out of the
starting gate.

I got
acquainted with the Reynaud house sound via their entry-level Twin Signature
model. (The Signature editions are refined and upgraded versions of the original
models, and are the only versions of said models currently available.) The
Twins are small (17" high, 14" deep, 8" wide) and my listening room is quite
large (about 26' long by 14' wide). But darned if the little Twins did not fill
the space with vibrant, tonally rich, and wholly involving sound.

As one might
expect, the Twins' forte was small-scale pop, rock and chamber classical. Give
them something "big" like Stokowski in Living Stereo (the recent Rhapsodies
SACD reissue), and the constriction was noticeable. But listening to a Japanese
CD reissue of XTC's English Settlement was a real "wow" experience: alive
in a way that made my (beloved) Harbeths sound downright buttoned-up. Bass was
surprisingly good for such a small box, giving Barry Andrews' drum kit real
thwack and Colin Moulding's fretless electric bass a real foundation. When this
album was made in 1982, XTC was just making the transition from a tight,
well-oiled touring band to a studio-only collective, and the live-on-the-floor
sound of many of these tracks really came through via the Twins.

On this and
other discs, the Twins' sound-staging did not nail the players to a precise
point in an artificial way, but gave each musician his own little cushion of air—just as a performance would sound in person. In fact, these little monitors
delivered the adrenalin rush of live music amazingly well. The Twins combine
the airiness and speed associated with electrostatic speakers with the bass
integration and coherence that drivers do best. At $1,060 for the pair, they
are a true audiophile experience. If your listening room is on the smallish
side, they may be all you'll ever need.

But in my big
living room I did miss some of the weight and scale of a larger speaker. So
after spending a couple of weeks with the Twins, I was anxious to get the
floorstanding Cantabiles in my system, expecting a bigger, even better version
of the Twins. That's not quite what I got. The Cantabiles are fussier, with a
slightly different character than their little brothers. But they are still
very much Reynauds, with a near-magical presence and immediacy.

The Cantabiles
are a transmission line design, with a slotted front port at the bottom and a
silk dome tweeter that sits on top of the main cabinet. A transmission line is
a rather complicated bass-delivery system that involves a long line coiling its
way through the main cabinet and to the port. Some manufacturers play fast and
loose with the term, but a true transmission line design is difficult and costly
to manufacture. When it's done correctly and well, as it is in the Cantabiles,
the resultant bass has a tightness, tunefulness and musical "rightness" that
make most conventional woofers sound a bit wooly.

I had to work a
little, though, to get the Cantabiles to sound right in my system and in my
room. I quickly figured out that the speakers performed best at least three
feet from the back wall, and at least the same distance from the side walls. But at first, the Cantabiles seemed a collection of great parts that wasn't
quite coming together. Most notably, the treble seemed discontinuous with the
bass, and I wondered if that top-mounted tweeter was to blame. My sensitivity
in this area is pretty keen, both by predilection and training (one of the
undoubted strengths of my reference Harbeths is the integration of their tweeter
and woofer; they speak with one voice about as well as any speaker at any
price). But with the Cantabiles, listening to any recording mixed or mastered a
bit hot—which, of course, the majority of CDs are these days—resulted in a
too-strident sound where the tweeter seemed to be overpowering the bass cabinet.
My somewhat "live" listening room may have been partly to blame, but I hadn't
experienced this with other speakers in the same room.

Let's face it,
whether one has a relatively modest or super-high-end system, proper matching is
more than half the battle. So I set about seeing what I could do to help the
Cantabiles give of their best. Cables were the obvious first line of
experimentation. The low-priced but high-performing MAC cables I currently use
are exceptionally smooth and a tad warm, so I doubted that they were
contributing to the hardness I was hearing. But sometimes perfectly good cables
and components make poor electrical matches, and things got better when I threw
a pair of FLEXYGY speaker cables from River Cable into the mix. They got even
better when I substituted the single-wire Rivers for bi-wire Audio Note speaker
cables. I don't know if it was primarily the bi-wiring or the excellence of the
Audio Notes (or both), but on the SACD of Hilary Hahn playing the Elgar violin
concerto, the tonality was sweeter, the orchestral sound better balanced, and
the stridence substantially tamed. Continued listening over the next few days
confirmed these impressions, but even so my satisfaction with the Cantabiles
varied from recording to recording. The excess top-end action was alleviated,
but not gone.

No speaker
should be reviewed with only one amplification source, and I suspected that the
Cantabiles just were not digging my solid-sate Coda/Continuum Unison
integrated. The Unison has performed faultlessly with everything I've fed it
over the last couple of years—it is so clean and consistent that I almost
forget about it as a factor—but it turned out to be a mismatch in this case. Swapping out the Unison for the softer-voiced Marsh separates—tube preamp and
solid-state power amp—was the "A ha!" moment with the Cantabiles. From there
on, it pretty much all came together.

The Cantabiles,
like the Twins, are great rock ‘n roll speakers that communicate both the
top-end energy and bass power that the music demands. During one weekend LP
marathon, the Ramones' eponymous first album, the Stooges' Fun House, and
Nirvana's Nevermind all brought the house down, making it both impossible
to stay seated and impossible to do anything but focus entirely on the music. As afternoon turned to evening, Edith Frost's spare and sweetly melancholy new
song cycle, It's a Game, sounded every bit as good.

It's a
reviewing cliché that speakers that excel at rock ‘n roll well don't fare as
well with classical and acoustic-based music—and quite a few listeners seem
perfectly happy to accept this trade-off in one direction or the other. But
Reynaud speakers don't optimize one at the expense of the other. On the new
disc from the nouveau bluegrass outfit Nickel Creek, Why Should the Fire Die?,
the Cantabiles were just as spectacular at conveying the string action and
breathtakingly fast finger-picking on acoustic guitar and mandolin as they were
at delivering the crunch of Kurt Cobain's multi-layered electric guitars.

With classical
music, the Cantabiles don't add lushness the way some classical-minded speaker
designs do. What they do is remind you that lushness is not the whole ball of
wax when it comes to this music. If you go to the concert or chamber hall, you
know that the thrust and attack, the dynamics, and the turn-on-a-dime transient
speed of the instruments are a large part of the excitement. Listening to
Rachel Podger's set of Vivaldi violin concertos La Stravaganza through
the Cantabiles, the bite of the period instruments was startlingly real and very
welcome. On another Channel Classics SACD, of Pieter Wispelwey and Dejan Lazic
playing sonatas of Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten, the in-the-room presence
of the two musicians, the sense of air and space around them, was stunning.

Some final
thoughts

Though I don't
want to belabor this "shootout" angle between my Harbeths and the Reynauds, one
final comparison is instructive. The Compact 7s are well-known for
incorporating a small upper-midrange dip that lifts the mid-bass and helps give
them their urbane character. By contrast, the Reynauds seem to me to have a
slight, judiciously employed upper-midrange emphasis. At the end of the day,
neither is necessarily more "accurate" than the other—they each reflect their
designer's personal biases. And Reynaud speakers are definitely not
sharp and super-etched, à la some of the old Thiel or Wilson models. But, I
believe this slight upper-mid tilt gives the Reynauds their characteristic zing,
and when you play with the top end you're playing with fire – the upper
frequencies are harder to control, and the ear is much more sensitive to any
anomalies there.

I assume that
this is the factor that made it a bit more challenging than usual for me to find
the right play partners for the Cantabiles. But once I did find the right
balance of supporting components, the Cantabiles were the first speakers in six
years that threatened to displace my (beloved) Harbeths. I won't go as far as
to say they're "better" per se, but they offer a fundamentally different,
equally persuasive, and tremendously exciting viewpoint—and they truly opened my
ears to a new way of hearing.

Postscript:
I packed up the car this past weekend to return the Twins and Cantabiles to
Amherst Audio. Having driven an hour and three-quarters to do so, I could not
resist the opportunity to sit back for a bit and listen to some of Bob's gear. I had the chance to hear both the Twins and Cantabiles driven by the all-tube
Manley Stingray integrated. The quality of the digital front end—a high-end
Audio Note rig—was certainly a factor, but hearing both speakers with two or
three additional sets of amplification made it clear to me that Reynauds love
push-pull tubes—and in the case of the Cantabiles, in particular, the Stingray
was a real difference-maker. In fact, my previous reservations about the Cantabs, especially with all-solid-state amplification—preserved exactly as
written above—were entirely put to rest. The Stingray tamed any sense of
forwardness from their performance, leaving only an open, airy balance and
little if anything to be desired.

The Stingray also did something pretty special with
the Twins, producing a highly seductive, more honeyed tonal balance while also
opening up their sound, making them seem less small and less spatially
constricted in what was a fairly large listening room.

So, as if I
didn't already know, another reminder—matching is everything! Sometimes you
have to work to find a component's sweet spot… but then, that's part of the fun
of the hobby, isn't it? The Twins seemed to me to thrive, and maintain a
consistent character, with just about everything, but were subjectively most
beautiful with the tubed Manley Stingray. The Cantabiles were pickier about
their partners, and seemed to almost demand tubes to give of their best. Both
of these Reynaud offerings are brilliant designs and great values. They are the
work of a unique audio artist, and they demand your attention. Tom Campbell